RE: Confidentiality clause is back in at Nature

["Beckman, Carol" <cbeckman@ECRI.org>]

Not to beat a dead horse about this, but I wanted to add a 
distinction that I don't think has yet been made.  I would think 
that closed pricing would always favor the transactor with the 
larger economic pull in a given transaction.  In other words, the 
one who can "leave it" the most easily.  Open pricing favors the 
transactor with less bargaining power.

In this case, since Nature has a monopoly on their particular 
content, they are the ones who benefit from the closed pricing. 
They know that there are lots of libraries who don't really have 
an option to "leave it", since they need Nature's content or 
whatever.  So they have the bigger pull in this transaction. 
They don't really much care if a particular library cancels their 
subscription - it's a relatively small part of their business. 
But for a library to cancel the subscription is often a big deal, 
since there is no competitor who can provide those exact same 
articles.  Basically, this is a case of a monopoly pushing their 
weight around.

So it doesn't really matter if it's the buyer or the seller - 
it's the small guy who gets screwed by a closed bid pricing 
system.

Regards,

Carol Beckman
ECRI Library
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